So, basically, 80% of people think AGW is a load of crap, and 20% have some level of concern.
Remember, this is a survey on the ABC.
I have been checking on the results a couple of times a day since it started, and the voting trend has not deviated more than 1% from the above results amongst the choices right from the beginning.
Given the lengths we have seen the alarmists go to the following scenario is a distinct possibility. You must complete the survey before requesting seats in the audience for the debate. What if alarmists are answering the questions to pass as a sceptic so they can attend the show and then be ‘converted’? I am sure there will be a ‘worm’ or and end of debate survey. Also, having supplied name and address details it’s easy for production staff to exclude known real sceptics and/or include alarmist friends.
When I watch Q&A I always look at the supposed make up of the Audience (Labor, Coalition, etc) and it always seems reasonably balanced. But that often doesn’t gel with the audience reactions and responses which appear to lean more readily to the left – if measured by applause or jeers. Does anyone else think Q & A appears to be stacked? Certainly the twitter comments don’t appear to have much balance.
Whatever your persuasion this Easter time – I hope you have a safe and enjoyable break – especially you Jo!
“Does anyone else think Q & A appears to be stacked?” or perhaps a more realistic question, does anyone think Q & A isn’t stacked? And I have no doubt alarmists put themselves down as sceptics for the reasons you suggest and ABC “culls” the audience! Easter cheers to you Jaymez and I endorse your wishes for Jo.
Happy Easter All and safe travels to those braving the roads.
For those who haven’t seen it, Andrew Bolt has just posted on the Horst-Joachim Ludecke, Rainer Link, and Friedrich-Karl Ewert Study. Check out the savaging given to alarmist commenters on Andrews blog and have a look at the Study here
What a great catch cry: ER, WHAT MAN-MADE WARMING? It dovetails perfectly with I Can Change Your Mind About Climate
How appropriate, all the alarmist chickens are coming home to roost for Easter and look, they’ve lost their feathers!
Not at the beach AGAIN…!!
Having had a wonderful week when temperatures reached the mid 20’s (that’s centigrade, smartarse) with wall-to-wall sunshine, we’re back to normal-UK-Bank-holiday gloom, nasty winds, rain and 8 degrees C…. (cue global warming jokes..)
So – ENJOY YOURSELF, Jo – don’t give us over here a second thought….
I am fighting a private battle at my own little backwater in QLD…
Writing in my local paper about the scam that is CO2 man made induced global warming.
The feedback I get to letters to the editor include this diatribe…
` In his letter he (carefully) avoids to mention these basic laws, the first saying that cause follows the effect. The second: nothing can be destroyed but everything is transformed.`
…and…
` Now given that pollution must have an effect , and/or transformation of it will have an effect, he may from the heights of his scientific knowledge, enlighten all of us about the effects of climate of what we release in the sky (pollution).
`No effects? Because I don`t know.
Thank You.`
…sigh what do you do??????
I will keep peddling the truth…
… but it seems some times like we are paddling up shit creek with half a paddle!!!
anyway I can still smile at the world and eat an easter egg and have a beer…
Hmm, “Cause follows the effect”. It seems like your correspondent is somewhat temporally challenged at that point.
There, you have and excuse for another letter pointing that out, and explaining in words of no more than two syllables why a cause must always come before an effect. You could then point out that the effect you have just witnessed could, of course itself be the cause of another effect, in a chain reaction.
But there always has to be an original cause, and that is the bit that is missing. Are we putting CO2 into the atmosphere? Yes we are. Does the climate change? Yes it does. Does the CO2 make the climate change, or does the change in climate increase the CO2 in the atmosphere? Nobody knows. Or, if they do know, they haven’t been able to explain how it actually happens in a way that lets other people try it for themselves.
By the way, saying the effect precedes the cause, is like saying, “I got a black eye, and then you hit me”.
The ugly battle between rural residents and alternative energy mandates in California
In 2006 California’s Senate Bill 107 codified a requirement that by 2010 all electricity retailers in the state were to procure 20% of their electricity from “renewables.” That same year L.A. County Supervisor Michael Antonovich established Nuisance Abatement Teams that started combing the Mojave desert hitting isolated residents with ever-expanding lists of code violations, imposing whatever it took to drive residents out, and they made their intentions perfectly clear:
California is the perfect patsy. First Solar makes its own cadmium-telluride solar panels. Another cadmium-telluride panel manufacturer, Abound Solar (recipient of $400 million in loan guarantees) just shut down production, but First Solar doesn’t have to worry how much it costs to produce intermittent solar in the Mojave. California residents are required by law to pay whatever it takes. That’s the key to successful green crony capitalism: vertical green-subsidy integration. Solyndra and Abound really should have known. They weren’t corrupt enough.
Why is labour putting the nation in so much debt with the NBN in hard econmomic times just so that your computer will work a bit faster? And then I read that the government is going to sell the NBN to private enterprise after it is completed. Our representatives it seems only represent their club – and we’re not in it! This article is interesting –
One U.S. Corporation’s Role in Egypt’s Brutal Crackdown
The open Internet’s role in popular uprising is now undisputed. Look no further than Egypt, where the Mubarak regime today reportedly shut down Internet and cell phone communications — a troubling predictor of the fierce crackdown that has followed.
What’s even more troubling is news that one American company is aiding Egypt’s harsh response through sales of technology that makes this repression possible.
The Internet’s favorite offspring — Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — are now heralded on CNN, BBC and Fox News as flag-bearers for a new era of citizen journalism and activism. (More and more these same news organizations have abandoned their own, more traditional means of newsgathering to troll social media for breaking information.)
But the open Internet’s power cuts both ways: The tools that connect, organize and empower protesters can also be used to hunt them down.
Telecom Egypt, the nation’s dominant phone and Internet service provider, is a state-run enterprise, which made it easy on Friday morning for authorities to pull the plug and plunge much of the nation into digital darkness.
Moreover, Egypt also has the ability to spy on Internet and cell phone users, by opening their communication packets and reading their contents. Iran used similar methods during the 2009 unrest to track, imprison and in some cases, “disappear” truckloads of cyber-dissidents.
The companies that profit from sales of this technology need to be held to a higher standard. One in particular is an American firm, Narus of Sunnyvale, Calif., which has sold Telecom Egypt “real-time traffic intelligence” equipment.
Narus, now owned by Boeing, was founded in 1997 by Israeli security experts to create and sell mass surveillance systems for governments and large corporate clients.
The company is best known for creating NarusInsight, a supercomputer system which is allegedly used by the National Security Agency and other entities to perform mass, real-time surveillance and monitoring of public and corporate Internet communications in real time.
Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.
Other Narus global customers include the national telecommunications authorities in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — two countries that regularly register alongside Egypt near the bottom of Human Rights Watch’s world report.
“Anything that comes through (an Internet protocol network), we can record,” Steve Bannerman, Narus’ marketing vice president, once boasted to Wired about the service. “We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see what web pages they clicked on; we can reconstruct their (Voice Over Internet Protocol) calls.”
Other North American and European companies are selling DPI to enable their business customers “to see, manage and monetize individual flows to individual subscribers.” But this “Internet-enhancing” technology has been sought out by regimes in Iran, China and Burma for more brutal purposes.
In addition to Narus, there are a number of companies, including many others in the United States, that produce and traffic in similar spying and control technology. This list of DPI providers includes Procera Networks (USA), Allot (Israel), Ixia (USA), AdvancedIO (Canada) and Sandvine (Canada), among others.
These companies typically partner with Internet Service Providers to insert DPI along the main arteries of the Web. All Net traffic in and out of Iran, for example, travels through one portal — the Telecommunications Company of Iran — which facilitates the use of DPI.
When commercial network operators use DPI, the privacy of Internet users is compromised. But in government hands, the use of DPI can crush dissent and lead to human rights violations.
Setting the Bar High for DPI Sales
Even Republicans and Democrats seem to agree on this problem.
“Internet censorship is a real challenge, and not one any particular industry — much less any single company — can tackle on its own, ” Rep. Mary Bono Mack wrote in a 2009 letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, then chair of the House Commerce Committee. “Efforts to promote freedom of expression and to limit the impact of censorship require both private and public sector engagement.”
Earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton urged Egypt’s government “not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including on social media.”
Bono Mack’s letter and Clinton’s statement echo Free Press’ call for a congressional inquiry into the issue. But this is just a start.
Before DPI becomes more widely deployed around the world and at home, the Congress ought to establish clear criteria for authorizing the use of such surveillance and control technologies.
The power to control the Internet and the resulting harm to democracy are so disturbing that the threshold for using DPI must be very high.
Today we’re seeing the grave dangers of this technology unfold in real time on the streets of Cairo.
Correction: An earlier version of this post erroneously included Camiant and Zeguma Systems on a list of DPI providers. Both have been removed from this list. Camiant has partnered with Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) companies to provide “policy control solutions” that enable network operators “to better control and manage network usage,” according to 2009 press reports. Zeguma Systems went out of business in 2010.
6 April: NPR: All Things (Not)Considered: How Murdoch’s Aussie Papers Cover Climate Change
by David Folkenflik
Some weeks ago, I paid a visit to an eggshell-blue house in Newtown, a neighborhood on the west side of Sydney, to Wendy Bacon and her husband, Chris Nash…
Bacon, a professor of journalism at the University of Technology in Sydney, commissioned researchers and graduate students to examine six months’ worth of every article, feature piece, editorial and columns in 10 leading Australian papers on a proposal by the governing Labor Party to tax carbon emissions.
“What our study showed is that the majority of Australians are not getting a balanced or diverse view on a policy which was designed — at least in a small way — to tackle this problem,” Bacon said…
During my time in Australia, journalists said the Murdoch papers, to varying degrees, are receptive to those who question the science underlying projections of climate change…
At an academic conference in fall 2010, a former environmental reporter at The Australian, Asa Wahlquist, said she fought with editors routinely over the extent and nature of her coverage.
“I couldn’t do it anymore,” she told attendees, including environmental activists. “I hung in there for a long time because I thought it was important that at least I was in there trying.”
The scholar and journalist Robert Manne wrote a lengthy critique of The Australian in which he, too, devoted a section to reviewing its climate change coverage. His conclusions echoed those of Bacon.
“On balance, the opinion pieces and the news coverage in the paper was on the side of those who were against the climate scientists,” Manne said. “And that might be playing into the hands of the group I call the ‘denialists’ because all they have to do is create doubt in the public mind to make it much more difficult for politicians to take action.”…
Bacon found the most negative coverage in the country’s top-selling Murdoch tabloids — the Melbourne Herald Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph. The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt is said to be the top-read columnist in Australia. He presents as an outright skeptic of climate change, at one point calling competing newspapers that treat it as settled science “propagandists.”
The topic is a frequent subject of his political opinion show on the broadcast Network Ten.
That network is not owned by News Corp., but its chairman is Lachlan Murdoch, who remains a corporate director and major investor at his father’s company… http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/150142277/lt-div-gt-case-study-murdoch-s-aussie-papers-and-climate-change-lt-div-gt
no doubt this is more like Wendy’s idea of objective reportin!!!
7 April: NPR: All Things (not) Considered: Sunny Days Are Here Again — But Is That Good?
Temperatures around the nation have been unusually warm this spring. While it might be time to lie on a blanket in the park, climate scientists are worried. They say all these sunny days are actually an extreme weather event, one with local and global implications…
Climatologist Heidi Cullen with the research organization Climate Central has been closely following the spring heat. She tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan that it’s hard to get a sense of how big of a deal the so-called “warm wave” is because it’s so nice.
“We were breaking records by upward of 40 degrees in some places,” says Cullen, the author of The Weather of the Future. “It was this really ironic, extreme weather event because it was like, ‘I’m loving this,’ but at the same time it was incredibly unusual.”…
“Even heat waves, when they’re happening in the midst of July or August, are hard to really visualize,” she says.
Though scientists are hesitant to link tornado outbreaks, like those that struck near Dallas this week, to climate change, Cullen says it is fair to say that warmer weather creates extreme weather…
If you increase the Earth’s average temperature by about 1.4 degrees, which we’ve done, you see it penetrate into the weather, she says, especially with heat extremes. This past March is what Cullen calls a storybook example of that.
“We expect [heat waves] to last longer, which this one did, to affect broader areas, which this one did, and to be more intense, which this one was,” she says.
Cullen says the sooner work begins on the climate change issue, the better. There are time lags in the system, she says, so what we’re seeing now is a result of things that happened in the 1980s.
“Because of the time lags in the system, if you wait, you’ve really got problems,” she says. “So it’s this exercise in … trusting the science.
“The science tells us that if we don’t do anything about this problem, that by the middle and the end of the century, we’re looking at really a radically different climate,” she says…
“When we look at where the extremes have occurred in the U.S. over the last year, we see them essentially everywhere: droughts in the West, floods in the Northeast [and] tornadoes in the middle,” he (Christopher Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University, was a top editor on the IPCC report) says. “It really is the case that there is no place on the map that is immune to climate change and disasters. http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/150199962/sunny-days-are-here-again-but-is-that-good
top story on Murdoch’s Courier Mail website today:
8 April: Courier Mail: Steven Scott: OPINION: Why Julia Gillard is confident Campbell Newman will take the soft option on carbon tax
But the Federal Government is quietly confident that, when push comes to shove, Campbell Newman won’t put up much of a fight against the tax that is causing Labor so much political pain.
According to Gillard, Newman may even happily end up going along with many policies linked to the carbon tax if they benefit the state…
Gillard is not pretending she will face a carbon tax cheer squad from Brisbane’s George St, but she reckons the complaints from Newman and his team will be little more than bluster. She can point to a precedent.
Liberal NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell has been a fierce critic of the carbon tax. But he has also willingly shared the stage with Gillard to announce the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation – a fund to invest in renewable energy which is linked to the tax – to be based in Sydney…
But if Labor can show criticism from Newman and other conservative state leaders is fairly shallow, it hopes this could be the first step in Gillard’s battle to win over begrudging support for her climate change policies.
Voters are hardly likely to ever embrace the carbon tax, but if Labor can change the already strong perception that it is to blame for every price rise, they may come to accept it, as they did with the GST…
Consumers are hardly going to be won over by attempts to spell out how much the carbon tax will drive up power bills (about 11.2 per cent according to the latest forecast from the Queensland Competition Authority) but if they can put the increase into perspective, compared with other factors that are gobbling up a much greater share of price rises, the carbon tax may not seem as bad as it currently does.
The next stage in Labor’s campaign is likely to focus on the costs that would come if Abbott were to win the next election and start unscrambling the carbon tax.
Abbott has at least telegraphed his intention to do so pretty clearly, but that will not stop the process taking years and potentially leaving taxpayers open to compensation claims from businesses affected by the move…
Gillard is already trying to sow these seeds of doubt about Abbott’s intentions. She has suggested he would end up keeping the carbon tax or emissions trading scheme if he wins the next election.
And she has suggested voters would see related tax cuts and pension rises stripped away from them under the Coalition’s premise that you don’t need compensation if you don’t have the carbon tax – a move that could leave consumers worse off because prices would be unlikely to fall.
Or so the Government’s thinking goes.
The fact that Labor is now relying on this approach highlights just how far they have to go in winning over voters concerned about the cost of living in the 18 months before the next federal election. http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/premier-wont-block-carbon-tax/story-e6frerdf-1226319035305
with the Coalition not getting rid of Turnbull, and not being willing to even mention Climategate, much less dropping their own “climate change” policies, i don’t doubt Scott’s analysis might be proven right.
…..The Australian Patriot Party is the only Political Party in the World to stand up to the implementation of a “New World Order” by Power hungry Elite Globalist’s TAPP has great knowledge that their agenda is to create a cashless society implementing draconian laws and stripping away the People’s common Law rights and creating a “One World Government” through the United Nations. Everyday we see their evil plans uncovered by the controlled mainstream media bit by bit your civil Liberties are being stripped away So Every Australian is immediately required to make a decision between debt controlled slavery in perpetuity-or the age of prosperity. Both are eminently possible, one we will have. Which one? Now rely on your gut feeling, ignore the controlled media propaganda — it’s owned by your would-be masters, but decide now between perpetual slavery or the age of prosperity…..
“When a Nation loses its Sovereignty and the rest of the world watches, at this point I know that Tyranny has played its hand.”
– PJ Jackson
We will also defend the Australian way of life and culture from individuals or groups of who wish to destroy it.
Our government in Australia has the right to print its own money and instead chooses to borrow from overseas banks at high interest. We the people have to pay this debt back in the form of income tax which in 2011 was $63 Billion.
We are rich in resources in the Country but unfortunately many of our mines are now owned by overseas interest that only pay approximately 18% tax and are robbing Australians blind of our natural wealth yet Australians can pay up to almost 50% in Income tax.
Don’t we all own the resources under OUR land?
NO! The Government owns all the mineral rights and in turn the United Nations and World Banks control our Government.
If there were a “One World Government”, and Australia was the only country not to join, what do you suppose would happen?
The weakest part of a wall is not the bricks, but the mortar that holds the bricks together. While countries (the bricks) can’t agree on anything important, the UN (the mortar) will not be able to bind them together into a wall.
While the world has religious differences, while we speak different languages, while we have different political systems, while world has different customs that we hold dear, we are safe. Resist anything, or anybody, or any organisation, that wants to impose uniformity. Even if that uniformity comes in the guise of uniform Libertarianism.
TonyfromOZ has had some trouble getting his posts up and has asked me to post this one:
Now if this isn’t interesting, I don’t know what actually is.
This was announced in China barely four weeks back, and I wonder why it has received such little coverage:
China will accelerate the use of new-energy sources such as nuclear energy and put an end to blind expansion in industries such as solar energy and wind power in 2012, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao says in a government report published on March 5.
It would now seem that not only do we have a huge market in China for our steaming coal, they might actually be in the market for some of our Uranium as well.
Note how much hydro power China is generating. (incidentally, the total Hydro Power currently already delivering power in China is almost equal to ALL the power being generated here in Australia from all sources)
Note also how despite the tripling of Solar Power in total that came on line, actual delivery of power from solar sources fell, and in fact, fell also from Wind.
Note also the (perceived) anomaly that power from some sources fell during the year in the overall PERCENTAGE mix. While power delivery would have increased from most other sources, the huge expansion in the coal fired power construction sector would have seen their slice of that percentage pie increasing, hence making the others look like they have decreased.
At least somewhere in the World, Government’s are waking up.
When a Country that huge needs so much electrical power, it looks like traditional sources are the only effective way to achieve that.
I can just visualise the Gillard Government’s response to this.
Here is the original speech by Mr Wen, care of a commenter at Anthony’s who now has a post. Quite a bit of statecraft in the speech, but pretty clear that nukes and shale gas are IN wind & solar are OUT (except for gullible westerners since we’re happy to sell them anything they want to buy).
I abhor what the Australian national government and various state governments have done about subsidisation of renewables, particularly for rooftop PV but I interpret what Mr Wen said differently.
Some industries are plagued by excess production capacity.
and
We will prevent blind expansion in our capacity to manufacture solar energy and wind power equipment.
This makes sense because they have kicked European and US solar manufacturing to the sideline. The US have complained about Chinese subsidised imports and introduced a import tariff against Chinese solar panels. This has been low and influenced by the solar distributors and installers. The Europeans have run away from solar subsidisation.
I have no idea what the Chinese are going to do but where in the following statement does it indicate that China’s plan is not to keep installing wind and solar?
We will optimize the energy structure, promote clean and efficient use of traditional energy, safely and effectively develop nuclear power, actively develop hydroelectric power, tackle key problems more quickly in the exploration and development of shale gas, and increase the share of new energy and renewable energy in total energy consumption.
In fact the document contains a number of statements that talk about emissions be these not specified, could be particles or oxides of carbon, nitrogen or sulphur or all of them.
make every effort to strengthen innovation, energy conservation, and emissions reduction
make every effort to strengthen innovation, energy conservation, and emissions reduction
We will conserve energy, reduce emissions, and protect the ecological environment. The key to conserving energy and reducing emissions is to save energy, improve energy efficiency, and reduce pollution.
Maybe I didn’t look hard enough but nowhere was the words climate change used.
It takes a lot of power to make a wind turbine and a solar cell. I would hypothesise that the power consumed in the manufacture of either of these items is more than the savings they represent over their projected life time.
(Sounds like a nice little research project for somebody. Just don’t try getting “Gubmint” funding for it.”
Re the Anita Heiss biography, “Am I Black Enough For You”, the ABC closed comments and swiftly “disappeared” all the 20 answers they got saying they were nasty and some were racist.
The Random House publisher site promoting the book then “disappeared” some 150 odd comments which were evidently not the answer Anita was seeking! I’ll have more to say later, but as of a few minutes ago you can still see the latest comments and either make your own or capture what’s there for later reading as there are nearly enough for a paperback!
If ever there was a dramatic illustration of the future of freedom of speech under Julia Gillard, Bob Brown, the ABC and all others seeking implementation of the Finkelstein Media Restriction Report, it has been ironically demonstrated by one of the nine litigants who pursued action in a certain matter under Australia’s greviously flawed Racial Discrimination Act instead of exercising their rights under defamation laws, which would have aroused little if any opposition from anyone.
Recent Background.
Under Australia Council’s National Indigenous Arts Awards, Dr Anita Heiss received a major award for literature, and a $45,000 grant over two years to research and produce her next two works, including her memoirs. “It will be called Am I Black Enough For You and will unpack a lot of issues about Indigenous identity in the 21st century,” she said.
As mentioned in my 14 post, the ABC swiftly stopped comments on the book promotion interview of Anita by Carol Duncan who Twittered ” We’ve closed comment due to the nasty and occasionally racist nature of some of the one’s we’re getting”. Carol didn’t say they not only closed comment but next day wiped the existing ones.
Similarly Random House closed comment on their site promoting the book and wiped the 150 odd that had been made, presumably for the same reason! The vast majority were very considered and in no way racist IMHO. They were however, expressing their outrage over what they saw as the restriction on free speech under the decision of the judge in the RDA action. One commenter Shaneed summed it up well when she wrote “”Both the aborigines of the outback & the red necks from the outer suburbs & the various hues in between seem united in disgust at both your hypocrisy in going to law to censor some one else’s free speech”…….
No doubt the comments will be wiped as soon as possible from the other Random House link I gave in post 14.
Contrast that sort of response to use of free speech with that of this man. Plenty of nasty comments still there for all to read after more than 6 months yet since the RDA case he cannot even respond to correct errors in articles since written about him or the case. A disgraceful situation and one any of us could face in the Green/Labor future if we don’t wake up and rein in these totalitarians!
Adelade Today is running an article on the Quantum Research into people’s opinion on environmental issues with a poll (Global Warming bombs out again)
go have a look:
Jo will love the last sentence
“Cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, from the University of Western Australia, said the Australia SCAN result could be skewed by one part of the population, at the “conservative end of the spectrum” “.
I think that part of the population is called “the majority,” Stephan.
Look, a hockey stick!
Scroll down to the graph re pole shift velocity- and don’t they say correlation equals causation? Could it be that world average temperatures are driven buy pole shifting velocity?- seems a very neat correlation to my eye. A eureka moment! Try putting a tax on that. http://modernsurvivalblog.com/pole-shift-2/alarming-noaa-data-rapid-pole-shift/
Doesn’t it do that every year? I mean I thought we switched to keep people from getting bored. People in the Southern Hemisphere get our weather for 6 mos, then we get it back…
Whenever I put a link with this post the whole lot ends up in cyber space?
[Some links display correctly, but there is a repeated http reference on the front which means the site can’t be found.] /Fly
Part of an essay –
“Chinese Crackers”, historian Humphrey Mcqueen.
“…….Once bitten, twice bitten
The failure to question China’s future is endemic in Australia where the economy
is again being derailed by mineral exports. In the era of deregulation, policy
makers are left with no strategic options beyond predicting that the China boom
will go on, and on. Australians have been down this yellow‐cake road more than
once before. Our forebears believed that they would grow rich if only the Chinese
wore woolen socks and put sugar in their tea. In The Glugs of Gosh (1917) poet C J
Dennis portrayed his fellow Australians as exchanging
… pianers and pickles and spanners
For seventeen shiploads of stones.
From the late 1950s, Australians transferred that cargo‐cult mentality across to
Japan’s mineral imports, leaving Australia ‘a lucky country run mainly by secondrate
people who share its luck’, as Donald Horne recognised in1964. Until Rex
Connor became Minister for Minerals and Energy in 1973, no Swank of Gosh had
thought it necessary to put a number on ‘the contribution of the mining industry
to Australian welfare’. The answer came in the 1974 Fitzgerald Report, which
calculated that, far from adding to the national coffers, the Australian tax‐payer
had subsidised BHP, CRA and Aloca to ship our dirt to Japan to the tune of
$137m.15
Five years later, then Treasury Secretary John Stone warned that a
coming boom in energy exports meant that we must dismantle our still
substantial manufacturing sector to manage a new bout of currency
appreciation.16 Stone’s resources boom confirmed ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s conclusion
from observing cattle booms and Northern Territory booms: ‘They all went bust’.
Within seven years of Stone’s pronunciamento, treasurer Keating was bleating
about a banana republic as the exchange‐rate plunged.
Statistical inflation
These memories and experiences would have done no more than keep me wary
of a China boom. The catalyst for my becoming a China sceptic was a 2003 article
titled ‘Gold into Base Metals’ in one of the most prestigious publications in
bourgeois economics. From an examination of the evidence between 1978 and
1998, its author, Alwyn Young, documented the unreliability of Chinese statistics,
thereby turning ‘the extraordinary into the mundane’.17 My mentions of Young’s
evidence encountered blank stares, although Crickey accepted a version in mid‐
2007. Because of the seminal place that Young’s article had in my outlook on
China, and because so much of the popular belief is based on very big numbers
about its growth, I shall open with his material.
Instead of fiddling with the final figures published by central
administrators, Young tracked how those results had been constructed from the
results forwarded from below. Lower‐level officials were rewarded for meeting
expectations and punished for failing to come in on target, as had been the case
for millennia. From time to time, the central authorities tried to correct the
errors. For instance, ‘the 1994 gross industrial output estimates were revised
downward by about 9 percent’. That year, the government identified 70,000
cases of misrepresentation. Another reason for the gulf between the hype and
the performance has been a ‘systematic understatement of inflation by
enterprises’. Young concluded that ‘the growth rate is not the highest in all…
Have sceptics noticed that the Govt has advertised for a new Director for the BoM ? Newspaper ad appears Easter Saturday ?
I have a summary of what is a fairly involved story – starting with the Review of BoM “capacity” commenced last July and slated to finish in Nov 2011. Note the review Terms of Ref beats up extreme events – and includes “..the Bureau’s capability to conduct seasonal forecasting..”. http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/
so much yet to play out.
Drove down to Melbourne from Sydney on Good Friday. Noticed that the Wind Farm (sorry TonyfromOz) just past Goulburn was standing majestically on the hill top. Not a single blade was moving. Lots of electricity not being generated then …
Drove back on the Monday and the same wind farm was actually working because there was a breeze. On a sample of 2, that is about 50% utilisation … for how many millions of dollars?
.
Just an update on the ABC “I Can Change Your Mind About Climate” for those of interested.
At the time of posting 7866 people hve taken the survey.
Alarmed – 12%
Concerned – 5%
Cautious – 3%
Disengaged – 1%
Doubtful – 12%
Dismissive – 67%
So, basically, 80% of people think AGW is a load of crap, and 20% have some level of concern.
Remember, this is a survey on the ABC.
I have been checking on the results a couple of times a day since it started, and the voting trend has not deviated more than 1% from the above results amongst the choices right from the beginning.
00
80% hmmmm… Must be another of those “consensus” thingys.
Have a wonderful Easter weekend wherever you may call home.
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Love your work mv, I’ve been following it too. Dismissive % has hardly moved from 66% on April 3.
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I wonder how many of the 20%ers base their views on “an inconvenient
untruth”00
Given the lengths we have seen the alarmists go to the following scenario is a distinct possibility. You must complete the survey before requesting seats in the audience for the debate. What if alarmists are answering the questions to pass as a sceptic so they can attend the show and then be ‘converted’? I am sure there will be a ‘worm’ or and end of debate survey. Also, having supplied name and address details it’s easy for production staff to exclude known real sceptics and/or include alarmist friends.
When I watch Q&A I always look at the supposed make up of the Audience (Labor, Coalition, etc) and it always seems reasonably balanced. But that often doesn’t gel with the audience reactions and responses which appear to lean more readily to the left – if measured by applause or jeers. Does anyone else think Q & A appears to be stacked? Certainly the twitter comments don’t appear to have much balance.
Whatever your persuasion this Easter time – I hope you have a safe and enjoyable break – especially you Jo!
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“Does anyone else think Q & A appears to be stacked?” or perhaps a more realistic question, does anyone think Q & A isn’t stacked? And I have no doubt alarmists put themselves down as sceptics for the reasons you suggest and ABC “culls” the audience! Easter cheers to you Jaymez and I endorse your wishes for Jo.
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How do I tell that survey that we needed to act a few years ago to prepare for dangerous solar caused global cooling?
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The term representative democracy is an oxymoron.
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Happy Easter All and safe travels to those braving the roads.
For those who haven’t seen it, Andrew Bolt has just posted on the Horst-Joachim Ludecke, Rainer Link, and Friedrich-Karl Ewert Study. Check out the savaging given to alarmist commenters on Andrews blog and have a look at the Study here
What a great catch cry: ER, WHAT MAN-MADE WARMING? It dovetails perfectly with I
CanChange Your Mind About ClimateHow appropriate, all the alarmist chickens are coming home to roost for Easter and look, they’ve lost their feathers!
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Not at the beach AGAIN…!!
Having had a wonderful week when temperatures reached the mid 20’s (that’s centigrade, smartarse) with wall-to-wall sunshine, we’re back to normal-UK-Bank-holiday gloom, nasty winds, rain and 8 degrees C…. (cue global warming jokes..)
So – ENJOY YOURSELF, Jo – don’t give us over here a second thought….
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I am fighting a private battle at my own little backwater in QLD…
Writing in my local paper about the scam that is CO2 man made induced global warming.
The feedback I get to letters to the editor include this diatribe…
` In his letter he (carefully) avoids to mention these basic laws, the first saying that cause follows the effect. The second: nothing can be destroyed but everything is transformed.`
…and…
` Now given that pollution must have an effect , and/or transformation of it will have an effect, he may from the heights of his scientific knowledge, enlighten all of us about the effects of climate of what we release in the sky (pollution).
`No effects? Because I don`t know.
Thank You.`
…sigh what do you do??????
I will keep peddling the truth…
… but it seems some times like we are paddling up shit creek with half a paddle!!!
anyway I can still smile at the world and eat an easter egg and have a beer…
… life aint that bad!!!
… I could have been working at UEA.
🙂
Happy Easter fellow Nova Stars…
You are my inspiration….
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Hmm, “Cause follows the effect”. It seems like your correspondent is somewhat temporally challenged at that point.
There, you have and excuse for another letter pointing that out, and explaining in words of no more than two syllables why a cause must always come before an effect. You could then point out that the effect you have just witnessed could, of course itself be the cause of another effect, in a chain reaction.
But there always has to be an original cause, and that is the bit that is missing. Are we putting CO2 into the atmosphere? Yes we are. Does the climate change? Yes it does. Does the CO2 make the climate change, or does the change in climate increase the CO2 in the atmosphere? Nobody knows. Or, if they do know, they haven’t been able to explain how it actually happens in a way that lets other people try it for themselves.
By the way, saying the effect precedes the cause, is like saying, “I got a black eye, and then you hit me”.
Happy Easter
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Thanks Rereke!
I did notice that anamoly in his letter, and was planning my response around that!
You put it well, Cheers.
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And we think Gillard and Co are corrupt.
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I wasn’t aware of that, Bob. Thanks. That adds a whole new meaning to “industrial strength investment”.
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Why is labour putting the nation in so much debt with the NBN in hard econmomic times just so that your computer will work a bit faster? And then I read that the government is going to sell the NBN to private enterprise after it is completed. Our representatives it seems only represent their club – and we’re not in it! This article is interesting –
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happy easter everyone.
6 April: NPR: All Things (Not)Considered: How Murdoch’s Aussie Papers Cover Climate Change
by David Folkenflik
Some weeks ago, I paid a visit to an eggshell-blue house in Newtown, a neighborhood on the west side of Sydney, to Wendy Bacon and her husband, Chris Nash…
Bacon, a professor of journalism at the University of Technology in Sydney, commissioned researchers and graduate students to examine six months’ worth of every article, feature piece, editorial and columns in 10 leading Australian papers on a proposal by the governing Labor Party to tax carbon emissions.
“What our study showed is that the majority of Australians are not getting a balanced or diverse view on a policy which was designed — at least in a small way — to tackle this problem,” Bacon said…
During my time in Australia, journalists said the Murdoch papers, to varying degrees, are receptive to those who question the science underlying projections of climate change…
At an academic conference in fall 2010, a former environmental reporter at The Australian, Asa Wahlquist, said she fought with editors routinely over the extent and nature of her coverage.
“I couldn’t do it anymore,” she told attendees, including environmental activists. “I hung in there for a long time because I thought it was important that at least I was in there trying.”
The scholar and journalist Robert Manne wrote a lengthy critique of The Australian in which he, too, devoted a section to reviewing its climate change coverage. His conclusions echoed those of Bacon.
“On balance, the opinion pieces and the news coverage in the paper was on the side of those who were against the climate scientists,” Manne said. “And that might be playing into the hands of the group I call the ‘denialists’ because all they have to do is create doubt in the public mind to make it much more difficult for politicians to take action.”…
Bacon found the most negative coverage in the country’s top-selling Murdoch tabloids — the Melbourne Herald Sun and the Sydney Daily Telegraph. The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt is said to be the top-read columnist in Australia. He presents as an outright skeptic of climate change, at one point calling competing newspapers that treat it as settled science “propagandists.”
The topic is a frequent subject of his political opinion show on the broadcast Network Ten.
That network is not owned by News Corp., but its chairman is Lachlan Murdoch, who remains a corporate director and major investor at his father’s company…
http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/150142277/lt-div-gt-case-study-murdoch-s-aussie-papers-and-climate-change-lt-div-gt
no doubt this is more like Wendy’s idea of objective reportin!!!
7 April: NPR: All Things (not) Considered: Sunny Days Are Here Again — But Is That Good?
Temperatures around the nation have been unusually warm this spring. While it might be time to lie on a blanket in the park, climate scientists are worried. They say all these sunny days are actually an extreme weather event, one with local and global implications…
Climatologist Heidi Cullen with the research organization Climate Central has been closely following the spring heat. She tells weekends on All Things Considered guest host Laura Sullivan that it’s hard to get a sense of how big of a deal the so-called “warm wave” is because it’s so nice.
“We were breaking records by upward of 40 degrees in some places,” says Cullen, the author of The Weather of the Future. “It was this really ironic, extreme weather event because it was like, ‘I’m loving this,’ but at the same time it was incredibly unusual.”…
“Even heat waves, when they’re happening in the midst of July or August, are hard to really visualize,” she says.
Though scientists are hesitant to link tornado outbreaks, like those that struck near Dallas this week, to climate change, Cullen says it is fair to say that warmer weather creates extreme weather…
If you increase the Earth’s average temperature by about 1.4 degrees, which we’ve done, you see it penetrate into the weather, she says, especially with heat extremes. This past March is what Cullen calls a storybook example of that.
“We expect [heat waves] to last longer, which this one did, to affect broader areas, which this one did, and to be more intense, which this one was,” she says.
Cullen says the sooner work begins on the climate change issue, the better. There are time lags in the system, she says, so what we’re seeing now is a result of things that happened in the 1980s.
“Because of the time lags in the system, if you wait, you’ve really got problems,” she says. “So it’s this exercise in … trusting the science.
“The science tells us that if we don’t do anything about this problem, that by the middle and the end of the century, we’re looking at really a radically different climate,” she says…
“When we look at where the extremes have occurred in the U.S. over the last year, we see them essentially everywhere: droughts in the West, floods in the Northeast [and] tornadoes in the middle,” he (Christopher Field, a climate scientist at Stanford University, was a top editor on the IPCC report) says. “It really is the case that there is no place on the map that is immune to climate change and disasters.
http://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/150199962/sunny-days-are-here-again-but-is-that-good
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top story on Murdoch’s Courier Mail website today:
8 April: Courier Mail: Steven Scott: OPINION: Why Julia Gillard is confident Campbell Newman will take the soft option on carbon tax
But the Federal Government is quietly confident that, when push comes to shove, Campbell Newman won’t put up much of a fight against the tax that is causing Labor so much political pain.
According to Gillard, Newman may even happily end up going along with many policies linked to the carbon tax if they benefit the state…
Gillard is not pretending she will face a carbon tax cheer squad from Brisbane’s George St, but she reckons the complaints from Newman and his team will be little more than bluster. She can point to a precedent.
Liberal NSW Premier Barry O’Farrell has been a fierce critic of the carbon tax. But he has also willingly shared the stage with Gillard to announce the $10 billion Clean Energy Finance Corporation – a fund to invest in renewable energy which is linked to the tax – to be based in Sydney…
But if Labor can show criticism from Newman and other conservative state leaders is fairly shallow, it hopes this could be the first step in Gillard’s battle to win over begrudging support for her climate change policies.
Voters are hardly likely to ever embrace the carbon tax, but if Labor can change the already strong perception that it is to blame for every price rise, they may come to accept it, as they did with the GST…
Consumers are hardly going to be won over by attempts to spell out how much the carbon tax will drive up power bills (about 11.2 per cent according to the latest forecast from the Queensland Competition Authority) but if they can put the increase into perspective, compared with other factors that are gobbling up a much greater share of price rises, the carbon tax may not seem as bad as it currently does.
The next stage in Labor’s campaign is likely to focus on the costs that would come if Abbott were to win the next election and start unscrambling the carbon tax.
Abbott has at least telegraphed his intention to do so pretty clearly, but that will not stop the process taking years and potentially leaving taxpayers open to compensation claims from businesses affected by the move…
Gillard is already trying to sow these seeds of doubt about Abbott’s intentions. She has suggested he would end up keeping the carbon tax or emissions trading scheme if he wins the next election.
And she has suggested voters would see related tax cuts and pension rises stripped away from them under the Coalition’s premise that you don’t need compensation if you don’t have the carbon tax – a move that could leave consumers worse off because prices would be unlikely to fall.
Or so the Government’s thinking goes.
The fact that Labor is now relying on this approach highlights just how far they have to go in winning over voters concerned about the cost of living in the 18 months before the next federal election.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/premier-wont-block-carbon-tax/story-e6frerdf-1226319035305
with the Coalition not getting rid of Turnbull, and not being willing to even mention Climategate, much less dropping their own “climate change” policies, i don’t doubt Scott’s analysis might be proven right.
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I’d never heard of this party till now –
http://www.australianpatriotparty.com
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http://www.australianpatriotsparty.com.au/
correction.
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I got as far as reading “chemtrails” on their main page and just closed it.
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If there were a “One World Government”, and Australia was the only country not to join, what do you suppose would happen?
The weakest part of a wall is not the bricks, but the mortar that holds the bricks together. While countries (the bricks) can’t agree on anything important, the UN (the mortar) will not be able to bind them together into a wall.
While the world has religious differences, while we speak different languages, while we have different political systems, while world has different customs that we hold dear, we are safe. Resist anything, or anybody, or any organisation, that wants to impose uniformity. Even if that uniformity comes in the guise of uniform Libertarianism.
Our greatest defence is chaos.
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Nice cover story Jo, but we know you never rest.
You are obviously checking the beaches for signs of those hugh ocean level rises we have been told to expect.
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TonyfromOZ has had some trouble getting his posts up and has asked me to post this one:
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Tony didn’t have to worry.
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Here is the original speech by Mr Wen, care of a commenter at Anthony’s who now has a post. Quite a bit of statecraft in the speech, but pretty clear that nukes and shale gas are IN wind & solar are OUT (except for gullible westerners since we’re happy to sell them anything they want to buy).
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I abhor what the Australian national government and various state governments have done about subsidisation of renewables, particularly for rooftop PV but I interpret what Mr Wen said differently.
and
This makes sense because they have kicked European and US solar manufacturing to the sideline. The US have complained about Chinese subsidised imports and introduced a import tariff against Chinese solar panels. This has been low and influenced by the solar distributors and installers. The Europeans have run away from solar subsidisation.
I have no idea what the Chinese are going to do but where in the following statement does it indicate that China’s plan is not to keep installing wind and solar?
In fact the document contains a number of statements that talk about emissions be these not specified, could be particles or oxides of carbon, nitrogen or sulphur or all of them.
Maybe I didn’t look hard enough but nowhere was the words climate change used.
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It takes a lot of power to make a wind turbine and a solar cell. I would hypothesise that the power consumed in the manufacture of either of these items is more than the savings they represent over their projected life time.
(Sounds like a nice little research project for somebody. Just don’t try getting “Gubmint” funding for it.”
China has to get that power from somewhere.
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Enjoy the beach, Jo. It’s not quite beach time here in the old USA, but I’m looking forward to it.
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Re the Anita Heiss biography, “Am I Black Enough For You”, the ABC closed comments and swiftly “disappeared” all the 20 answers they got saying they were nasty and some were racist.
The Random House publisher site promoting the book then “disappeared” some 150 odd comments which were evidently not the answer Anita was seeking! I’ll have more to say later, but as of a few minutes ago you can still see the latest comments and either make your own or capture what’s there for later reading as there are nearly enough for a paperback!
Go for it now while there’s still time.
http://www.randomhouse.com.au/blog/anita-heiss-wins-at-the-deadly-awards-1389.aspx
or
Google Anita Heiss Wins at the Deadly Awards – Random House.
I’ve done a copy and paste at 12.55pm to read at my leisure.
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The comments, and they are scathing about Heiss, are here:
http://www.uploadscreenshot.com/image/888720/300589
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cohenite: thanks for the link.
Very interesting those comments. Scathing, as you said, and a lot more than 20 commenting. Apart from a token leftie very, very far from the ABC view.
The ABC wouldn’t have liked it one little bit, and am not surprised that they “disappeared” the comments.
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Thanks for that. I’d gotten about 2/3 of the way through reading them, then refreshed to see if any more had been added, and they’d disappeared.
I have a copy of the other thread though.
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http://wyckynews.com.au/conspiracy/global-warming-climate-change-hoax-refuted-with-real-evidence/
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If ever there was a dramatic illustration of the future of freedom of speech under Julia Gillard, Bob Brown, the ABC and all others seeking implementation of the Finkelstein Media Restriction Report, it has been ironically demonstrated by one of the nine litigants who pursued action in a certain matter under Australia’s greviously flawed Racial Discrimination Act instead of exercising their rights under defamation laws, which would have aroused little if any opposition from anyone.
Recent Background.
Under Australia Council’s National Indigenous Arts Awards, Dr Anita Heiss received a major award for literature, and a $45,000 grant over two years to research and produce her next two works, including her memoirs. “It will be called Am I Black Enough For You and will unpack a lot of issues about Indigenous identity in the 21st century,” she said.
As mentioned in my 14 post, the ABC swiftly stopped comments on the book promotion interview of Anita by Carol Duncan who Twittered ” We’ve closed comment due to the nasty and occasionally racist nature of some of the one’s we’re getting”. Carol didn’t say they not only closed comment but next day wiped the existing ones.
Similarly Random House closed comment on their site promoting the book and wiped the 150 odd that had been made, presumably for the same reason! The vast majority were very considered and in no way racist IMHO. They were however, expressing their outrage over what they saw as the restriction on free speech under the decision of the judge in the RDA action. One commenter Shaneed summed it up well when she wrote “”Both the aborigines of the outback & the red necks from the outer suburbs & the various hues in between seem united in disgust at both your hypocrisy in going to law to censor some one else’s free speech”…….
No doubt the comments will be wiped as soon as possible from the other Random House link I gave in post 14.
Contrast that sort of response to use of free speech with that of this man. Plenty of nasty comments still there for all to read after more than 6 months yet since the RDA case he cannot even respond to correct errors in articles since written about him or the case. A disgraceful situation and one any of us could face in the Green/Labor future if we don’t wake up and rein in these totalitarians!
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/opinion/silencing-me-impedes-unity/comments-e6frfifx-1226150249249
A good summary of events of the last few days is available at the site below.
http://bunyipitude.blogspot.com.au/2012/04/these-jokers-always-with-gags.html
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Adelade Today is running an article on the Quantum Research into people’s opinion on environmental issues with a poll (Global Warming bombs out again)
go have a look:
Jo will love the last sentence
“Cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, from the University of Western Australia, said the Australia SCAN result could be skewed by one part of the population, at the “conservative end of the spectrum” “.
I think that part of the population is called “the majority,” Stephan.
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/ipad/nation-goes-off-global-warming/story-fn6t2xlc-1226320777816
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Yes – 25%
No – 71%
Undecided – 4%
as at 845pm Easter Sunday
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Look, a hockey stick!
Scroll down to the graph re pole shift velocity- and don’t they say correlation equals causation? Could it be that world average temperatures are driven buy pole shifting velocity?- seems a very neat correlation to my eye. A eureka moment! Try putting a tax on that.
http://modernsurvivalblog.com/pole-shift-2/alarming-noaa-data-rapid-pole-shift/
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Pole taxes?
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Hmm,
For those folks North of the Equator …
Don’t bother moving to the Southern Hemisphere. The Southern Hemisphere is moving to you.
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Doesn’t it do that every year? I mean I thought we switched to keep people from getting bored. People in the Southern Hemisphere get our weather for 6 mos, then we get it back…
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Nice one – that gave me a good start to the day.
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here is a few links for the warmbots to ponder over
http://iceagenow.info/2012/04/alaska-sea-ice-recorded-history/
http://iceagenow.info/2012/04/highest-polar-bear-count/
http://iceagenow.info/2012/04/arctic-ice-extent-shatters-records/
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
global warming my arse!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Whenever I put a link with this post the whole lot ends up in cyber space?
[Some links display correctly, but there is a repeated http reference on the front which means the site can’t be found.] /Fly
Part of an essay –
“Chinese Crackers”, historian Humphrey Mcqueen.
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Have sceptics noticed that the Govt has advertised for a new Director for the BoM ? Newspaper ad appears Easter Saturday ?
I have a summary of what is a fairly involved story – starting with the Review of BoM “capacity” commenced last July and slated to finish in Nov 2011. Note the review Terms of Ref beats up extreme events – and includes “..the Bureau’s capability to conduct seasonal forecasting..”.
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/
so much yet to play out.
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Drove down to Melbourne from Sydney on Good Friday. Noticed that the Wind Farm (sorry TonyfromOz) just past Goulburn was standing majestically on the hill top. Not a single blade was moving. Lots of electricity not being generated then …
Drove back on the Monday and the same wind farm was actually working because there was a breeze. On a sample of 2, that is about 50% utilisation … for how many millions of dollars?
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